MattSnodBlog

Remember when Apple and Adobe played nice while thousands of scruffy graphic designers happily used Photoshop to retouch images on their Macs ... and all was right with the world? Well, it all seemed to go downhill over the Great Flash War of 2010.

I saw inklings of trouble when Adobe continued to not fully optimize their CS suite of applications for Mac's Cocoa OS framework throughout most of this past decade. And when the iPhone was released without Flash support, you felt there was trouble brewing. But now, it's getting ugly.

Apple and Adobe have gone tit for tat on the subject. The latest have involved Steve Jobs's open letter regarding Flash, and now Adobe has published founders' Chuck Geschke and John Warnock's open letter in response.

My take ... Is Apple right for not allowing Flash to run on their devices? Yes, it's their device, and Flash is a resource (battery) hog. Is Apple right for restricting creation of iPad and iPhone apps to Apple development platforms? No, that's just plain selfish; Apple's not the only one who knows how to make apps. Is Adobe right for whining about others trashing Flash (which they didn't even make, by the way)? No, Flash is showing its age in an era where computing is becoming more and more portable, where the need for battery life exceeds the need to play Farmville.

And Adobe's argument that Apple should support Flash because it has a 99% install base holds no merit. I'm sure the manufacturers of asbestos had a 99% install base at one point. That didn't make it a good thing. (Okay, that example was harsh, but you get my point.)

There's been a lot of talk as of late about the battle heating up between Apple and Adobe. In particular, Apple's decision not to support Adobe's Flash plug-in on some of its best-selling devices like the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and the upcoming iPad.

At a meeting with Wall Street Journal executives, Apple CEO Steve Jobs called Flash a "CPU hog" (it is) and didn't build the iPad to support it. Adobe retaliated on its blog, pointing out how the iPad isn't really a good way to experience the Internet if so much of the Web uses Flash (it does).

Frankly, I think this less about Apple's quibble with Adobe and more about their storied tradition of abandoning technologies that, frankly, were on their way out. Apple just sees these demises sooner than most and usually gets pilloried for their efforts. Let's take a look:

• Floppy drive: In 1998 Apple officially dumped the diskette with the introduction of the iMac. Thank you!
• SCSI: The only thing more confusing than configuring SCSI devices was ... okay, there was nothing more confusing than configuring SCSI devices. I'm serious.
• Serial port: Hey, the printer's not printing. Can I unplug the serial port and plug it back in? No, that's worse than crossing the streams.
• ADB port: Okay, the Apple Desktop Bus was their fault in the first place. No harm, no foul.
• Modem: Anyone who remembers what "baud" is, has no love loss for modems ... or this sound.
• Firewire400: It was getting slow, and if you accidentally plugged it in backwards, you could fry your device.
• PCMCIA: This laptop cardbus was about as fast as physically shoveling the data onto your computer. Apple did the right thing by dropping it for Express34 and then the wrong thing by dropping that for SD.

Perhaps Flash is just another in a long line of soon-to-be-aging technologies in which Apple is first to recognize their inevitable obsolescence. If you've ever checked your task manager (Windows) or activity monitor (Mac) while running a Web page with Flash, you've seen how much of a resource hog it can be.